6th World Conference of the International Federation for Public History (IFPH), Berlin 2022 Panel: Reclaiming the (Digital) Narrative: Cross-Professional Archival Collaborations Preserving and Mobilising Marginalised Community Histories Speech: Making Digital Archival Records Available today and Preserving them in the Long Term Francesco Gelati Head of Section A13 - Digital Services and Internal Consultancy University Archives, Universität Hamburg francesco.gelati@uni-hamburg.de https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6066-1308
As long as preservation of digital archival records is concerned, it is vital that archives-producing institutions and individuals adopt good digital practices from the very creation of the record. A member of a marginalised community or an independent scholar may record evidence of e.g. violence or oppression. This evidence, which is worth preserving, is an archival record in spe. Of course, these non-affiliated individuals will not be provided with professional services in the fields of IT risk management, data curation and data quality. It is moreover unlikely that they could afford such services on their own. Yet lack of IT and IS (information science) support reduces drastically chances that these digital records (e.g. audiovisual material or written documents) will be available and accessible in the middle term.
Several archival institutions worldwide are however willing to help. City archives do collect in Western Europe records (in any medium) concerning citizens’ lives. Public-owned (municipal, state, federal) archives are more and more testing strategies and software.
Firstly, it is important to perform digital curations. Digital objects should undergo proper storage, back-up, naming, versioning and user rights guidelines.
Archivists will take the digital objects over and will perform file-format identification and validation. Since it is impossible to make sure that marginalised communities will record their digital objects (say a video) in a file-format recommended for digital preservation, archivists might also decide to migrate those files to a different format, which might cause some loss.
Then, archivists will have to make these records and their descriptive metadata accessible. Metadata will be accessible with no restrictions, whether archival legislation may foresee a non-disclosure period or a period of restricted access. Long-term archiving should take place in the context of the ISO Standard OAIS (Open Archival Information System: https://www.iso.org/standard/57284.html).
Records and metadata should be findable too. A good option to be adopted is the Open Archives Initiative (http://www.openarchives.org/) in order to make descriptions of archival holdings contained in online catalogues digitally harvestable, interoperable and freely (re)usable.